[Disc] Best Books Available Today

[mr_shotgun_2000]

I was going to order a couple of books from amazon on game making, physics related stuff and 3d stuff and wanted to know which are the best ones available:

General Game Dev
Macromedia Flash MX 2004 Game Design Demystified By Jobe Makar

Physics And 3d Stuff
Programming Macromedia Flash MX by Robert Penner

AI
AI Game Programming Wisdom


Please add to this list

[hum]

ftp://ftp.ora.com/pub/graphics/book_...059600396X.jpg
ftp://ftp.ora.com/pub/graphics/book_...0596004907.jpg
These aren't specifically for games but they are helping me a lot with action script recipes ... oh ...and i really like both of Jobe Makars books

[|-|amilton]

Flash 5
Cartoons and Games
f/x & Design

This is a pretty good book for creating some specific games. It also helps with some animation and comes with a cd with examples.

[webgeek]

Jobe and I both really like the Charles River Media game books. This includes the Game Developer Gems books and the two AI Wisdom books. New Riders has some good general game books too, the one with Earnst Adams is nice. Important to remember though that these books are NOT Flash related. You better be good at translating concepts to code if you want the Gems and Wisdom books to do you any good. They provide many C++ examples if you know that.

Have fun!

[brad]

I strongly suggest Game Programming Gems and AI Game Programming Wisdom.

brad

[mr_shotgun_2000]

thanks guys

@Mike: I'l take your word for it mate! Thanks Loads!

[yellowman]

hi!
As for "physics related stuff", I can recommend this one:
Physics for Game Developers


/klas

[XcVbSdRw]

if you're not very experienced get Flash MX Actionscript for Fun and Games or Jobe's MX book (I like it better than the MX 2004 version).

unless you have an advanced math background don't even consider Physics for Game Developers. I bought it, spent a weekend with it and then returned it on Monday!

and, with all due respect to the experts around here, unless you have exhausted all the available Flash resources (books, tutorials, etc.) I'd steer clear of books like the Gems books. these are for advanced programmers and, as someone noted, certainly not usable directly in Flash.

bottom line, IMHO, if you are ready for the high-level, advanced books, you're probably also ready to move on to C++, assembler and bringing John Carmack his coffee!

[webgeek]

if you are ready for the high-level, advanced books, you're probably also ready to move on to C++, assembler and bringing John Carmack his coffee

I don't agree with this one. AI and many of the advanced techniques are not related to any specific technology. Some of the things Jobe presented at Flash Forward on multi-user environments and the like was gleaned from these non-Flash sources. Both his A* terain-capable pathfinder and my Dijkstra pre-computed one were built the same way. Just using advanced techniques doesn't mean you need to use new technologies.

Have fun!

[XcVbSdRw]

my point was more that once you become an advanced game programmer you can move on to bigger things like commercial game development.

[webgeek]

you can move on to bigger things like commercial game development

Not to pick on you specifically, but commercial game development is possible in Flash. Just check out many of the games on MiniClip or any of the other online game sites. Just cause it isn't a multi-million dollar game in C++ doesn't mean it isn't commercial.

[XcVbSdRw]

yeah, I know, when my kid sells lemonade in the front yard it is commercial too!

it seems to me very few if any Flash games achieve any sort of serious commercial success. show me a single Flash game that has earned even 1/10 of the money that can be earned by even a moderately good seller on the PC.

now I know this is kinda like comparing apples to oranges. comparing Flash games to retail games is like comparing the games on my cellphone to my kids' Playstation 2.

but that was my point a few posts ago. IMHO you can achieve pretty much anything you may want to do in Flash using the resources out there that are dedicated to Flash. when you are ready for the "industrial strength" stuff like that taught in the Gems series or Physics for Game Developers, you are probably close to hitting the wall on the Flash player anyway.

can you still learn from those books? of course! but I'd still exhaust all available Flash resources before turning to them. just my opinion.